All photos courtesy of Unsplash
David the Psalmist wrote in Psalm 8, "O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Your name in all the earth." When we look around at the world that God has made it is amazing! Whichever way we look we see the wonder of creation. We can look up at the grandeur of a huge snow-capped mountain range and the views are amazing.
I can remember as a child sitting in a train that was climbing slowly on a Swiss mountain railway, sat in the same carriage was a group of excited teenagers. They talked and laughed loudly as we went higher and higher. Their noise spoilt really the sense of awe that I was feeling looking around at the scenery.
The train came to its destination, it was a station cut out of the rock and as we alighted from the train we had to walk through a tunnel to a platform with a panoramic view. The view was truly awesome snow-covered mountains in every direction. I felt small and, in my head, I rehearsed the words of the famous hymn, "How great Thou art!"
The silence of the moment was shattered abruptly as the group of noisy teenagers began to catch up. Their noise crescendoed as they grew closer, yet they too fell silent as they comprehended "the lofty mountain grandeur."
There are so many other areas where we can look to see God’s stamp of greatness upon the earth. We can look at the migration of birds year after year over thousands of miles, the delicate parts of a flower, the tiny details on minuscule creatures, sea creatures that can survive in the depths of the oceans where we would be crushed by the pressure. God’s creation tells out His excellent name on this earth.
Romans chapter 1 tells us that as we look around at God’s awesome creation, we have no excuse, He is God, and His creation shows it.
Back in Psalm 8, David then stops looking around at the earth and lifts his eyes to the heavens and states that it is there we see God’s glory.
In Psalm 19 David tells us clearly that the purpose of the universe is to declare God’s glory. Stars innumerable, galaxies in their billions, every star is a sun and a perfectly placed Earth in constant orbit sustaining the life of the creature that is made in the image of God. All this tells us that there is a God, and He is almighty and wonderful.
In Psalm 8 David just wonders at the immensity, the vastness, the beauty of the universe, it causes him to ask a question. The question that David was pondering was how such an awesome God that requires an unmeasurable universe to tell of His glory could be interested in small, humble, failing humans like us. I do not really think that David managed to answer his own question. Neither can I!
Yet in the Psalm David says, ‘What is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You visit him?’ God not only was interested in us, but He also visited us and He did this through Jesus Christ. Despite our failure, despite our sin and rebellion, God is interested in us and wants to meet our needs.
In fact, God loves us and despite the fact that we go against God’s law and He hates our sin, He still loves us. Actually, He so loved the whole world, He gave the best that He had, His only begotten Son Jesus Christ to die to be our Saviour. How loved are we! More than we will ever know! What have we done about this wonderful act of love; how do we respond? When we believe in Him and accept this love, our sin is forgiven, our life and eternity is changed and we can learn to appreciate our awesome God.
John 3:16-18
For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.
“He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.
Messages with Meaning (13/01/21) Written by Stuart Scammell for Your542Day and used with permission
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